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Looking for Battle, Marines Find That Foes Have Fled
Rummana residents gather around an armored vehicle destroyed by a roadside bomb during the Marine offensive.
(Photos By Bilal Hussein -- Associated Press)
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Marines themselves eat little besides the heavily prepared, starchy, candy-laden Meals Ready to Eat packaged a year or so ago at a plant in Indiana. One young Marine's recent effort to vary their diet by taking a live turkey, cutting its head off with a shovel and boiling the carcass had turned out badly.
The Marines in the bedroom watched the cooking demonstration to the end. One turned to a friend. "Do you like eggplant?" he asked.
Before dawn Friday, Brown got up and washed the tea glasses used by his Marines. He left them drying on the family's sideboard. It doesn't pay to make enemies, Brown said.
An Elusive Quarry
"Where the [expletive] are these guys?" Maj. Kei Braun exclaimed in frustration.
It was noon Friday. The Marines had swept Arabi and found only frightened Iraqi families hiding in their homes. They had found more bombs in the roads, but no enemy to fight.
Marines said many of the foreign fighters fled west into Syria or to Husaybah, a lawless Iraqi border town where foreign fighters and local tribesmen have battled each other this month for control, shooting it out in the streets with AK-47s and mortars, American officials say. But the Marines lack the manpower to go into Husaybah.
So, within sight of Syria, they searched caves in the high, sheer rock escarpment that circles part of Arabi. Seeing a man come out of a cave, look out and go back in, a U.S. helicopter crew shot a Hellfire missile. Commanders came on the radio. Those were ordinary Iraqis hiding inside the caves, the commanders said. Hold off.
"These people here, it's not their fault," Kalouf, a young combat engineer with a mission to blow things up, said at the house commandeered by Brown's platoon. "They're scared for their lives. I used to get mad at them, but now I understand."
The insurgents were the only enemies, but they wouldn't come out to fight. "Frankly, I'm tired of going around not seeing anything, not knowing anything, and then having Marines, guys I know, get blown up by mines," Kalouf said.
"I'd much rather foreign fighters come out and shoot at us. We can respond to that," Kalouf said, as the Americans got ready to head back across the Euphrates. "We can't stand all their IEDs and mines, crap like that. Because we can't do that.''
